Tag Archives: Mac

Apple has sent out press invitations for a Media Event one week from today on October 20th that will be focused on the Mac, to be held at 10AM in Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

As is typical for Apple, they have included a clue in the promotional image, a Lion peaking out from behind a tilted Apple logo. Taking that in combination with the tagline for the event, “Back to the Mac.”, it’s likely that Apple will at least offer a preview of Mac OS X 10.7 codenamed “Lion”, though a release is probably still months away.

Apple’s notebook lineup is also due for a refresh, particularly the Macbook Air which has been neglected for quite some time, and has been the subject of rumors concerning a potential shrink from the 13.3″ form factor down to a netbook-like 11″ screen. Read more

For about 3 months now, Intel’s new “Arrandale” mobile Core i3/i5/i7 processors have been on the market — offered by many of the major PC makers in their latest laptops — but have not yet been integrated into Apple’s products. These CPUs are part of Intel’s “Nehalem” family, a major generational leap from previous Core 2 technology. Nehalem-class chips have been at the heart of the Mac Pro and quad-core iMacs for some time, and offer numerous advantages.

Arrandale, though only a two-core design versus the quads in current Core i5/i7 desktops, is ahead of those desktop chips in a few areas. Notably, it is one of Intel’s first Nehalem chips built on a 32-nanometer manufacturing process; each step in shrinking silicon chip manufacturing processes brings about greater energy efficiency, better price/performance, and allows more transistors to be packed onto a smaller chip footprint. Read more

From time to time, we select a few reader questions to answer as best we can, and today’s comes from Kyle.

Kyle:On your site, you often mention prototypes of Apple devices. I’m kind of curious how Apple works their prototype process. What do the prototype devices look like in the semi-finished state? Do they look like pieces of hardware slapped together by a sloppy DIYer or like the polished devices that we know Apple is famous for?

First, thanks to Kyle for writing in and asking your question. We’re always happy to part the veils of the rumor-mongering process when we can, and give our readers further insight into what it’s like to have unique access & insight into the goings-on at Infinite Loop. Read more

In the case of iPhone OS 3.0, we already have a fairly good idea of its feature set, performance, and reliability from the series of developer betas that have been released over the past several months. Although Apple has not yet made an official statement as to its final release date, there has been none of the hedging that we’ve seen with Snow Leopard; we wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some type of delay, or a “Final Beta” similar to Snow Leopard’s, will be announced today….but the most likely outcome is a release in the near term if not actually today.

Obviously, we’re very excited about that and we know all of you are as well. If we’re forced to wait for one more round of debugging to be carried out and for developers to test their apps against a set of new features, we’ll live…but many things about the dev process thus far, and the state of the mobile operating system itself, suggest that a release is imminent without significant further delay. Read more

Despite the previous build of Mac OS X 10.5.7 code-name “Juno” appearing nearly ready for release within days (it’s now been over a week), Apple has delivered a new seed — build 9J56 — to developers, and it looks like a little bit of work still remains before we’ll see 10.5.7 in Software Update.

From Apple’s build notes on 9J56, the following headline changes were highlighted for developers to test against:

Fixed an issue when a process is killed or crashes while using AFP

Bluetooth compatibility and stability fixes

Crash reports missing application’s short version info fix

Crash log file missing machine’s name fix

Fixed an issue with Personal File Sharing where an AFP volume was not a valid Time Machine backup disk

Although these seem relatively minor, set against the full “Juno” project changelist which is nearly 200 items long at this point (and doesn’t include subtle tweaks of relatively little interest to third party developers for whom the change logs are written)….of particular note is the focus on Bluetooth in this build. Read more

With the latest series of seeds — no less than three in the past week, culminating in yesterday’s distribution of build 9J50, and with one more possible prior to release — numerous indications have been given that the approximately 450-megabyte update package (or ~780MB “Combo Update”) will be hitting Software Update within the next week or so….possibly as soon as Friday.

Next Monday (4/20) has been mentioned as a possible release date by two separate sources familiar with Mac OS X & “iPhone OS” development at Infinite Loop, but according to these sources — who are generally quite reliable — the timing is now entirely dependent on how long it takes to quash current bugs as well as what if any new ones are submitted by developers in the interim. Read more

According to numerous reports from developers and other sources, this new build is considerably closer to being ready for prime time, but is most likely still at least 2-3 seeds away from being “done” which puts a release date at about a month from now. Stability in build 9J39 is solid but still far from perfect, and quite a few issues still arise from the new bundled Flash Player engine which was introduced in the last seed.

Given the fact that the last officially road-mapped release of Leopard, 10.5.8, is supposed to ship at or around the same time as Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (WWDC, June 8-12)….and several of the 10.5.x “debugging” team will switch over to work on Snow Leopard after 10.5.7 is out the door….we believe that this will be the last release anywhere near this ambitious and that future updates (whether they be point-upgrades or “security updates”) will be smaller, more frequent, and considerably less dependent on third party developers for hands-on testing. Read more

Since the introduction of the Mini in 2005, one of Apples main pushes for the machine was to be your first Mac, the one that swept you away from the PC world without breaking the bank. To that end one of the marketing slogans for the mini was BYODKM: bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. The mini includes none of these things in the box, it is simply the machine, with a power cord, and in the past a DVI to VGA adapter to enable connection to the monitor a user already has. In the past that monitor was probably VGA, however now with the introduction of the new Mini, not only is Apple moving half way to Mini Display port as all the rumors predicted, they are shrinking the remaining DVI port to Mini DVI. Read more

Now that Macworld 2009 has come and gone with no Mini, rumor sites and Mini lovers have been waiting patiently (or not) for some news on the new Mini. What will it look like? Will it adopt a new style to match the iMac and Unibody Macbook lines? Previous rumors about the Mini included talk of dual monitor ports (one Mini DVI and one Mini DisplayPort), a removed optical drive, no firewire (ala Unibody Macbook), 2 internal hard drives, and a complete merging of the Mini with the AppleTV. We previously covered these details and speculation on Apples plans.

In the past few days some details, a picture and a short video have surfaced that appear to show a Mini with the old style, the aluminum sides with the plastic top, sporting 5 USB ports, 2 video ports, Firewire 800, and an optical drive slot, but otherwise no major changes. Read more